Olga Lepeshinskaya, Bolshoi Ballet’s prima ballerina, dies at 92

Olga Lepeshinskaya, the Bolshoi Ballet’s prima ballerina for three decades during the Soviet times, has died. She was 92.

Nataliya Uvarova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Culture Ministry, said Lepeshinskaya died Saturday of an unspecified illness. The Itar-Tass news agency reported that Lepeshinskaya died in her sleep at her Moscow apartment.

Lepeshinskaya was born to a noble family in Kiev in 1916. When she first tried to enter the Bolshoi choreographic school, she was rejected.

The school admitted her shortly afterward, in 1925, and Lepeshinskaya graduated in 1933, immediately joining the Bolshoi Ballet. She was rumored to be the favorite ballerina of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and received the coveted Stalin Prize on four occasions.

Lepeshinskaya recalled in an interview published in the daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta in 2006 that Stalin once affectionately called her “dragonfly.”

As Bolshoi’s prima, Lepeshinskaya danced Kitri in “Don Quixote,” Tao-Hoa in “The Red Poppy,” Jeanne in “The Flames of Paris,” Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty” and Masha in “The Nutcracker,” among other parts.

She said Kitri, first performed in 1940, was her first big success. She was so eager to dance, she said, that she asked her friends to hold her offstage so she wouldn’t enter ahead of time.

During World War II, Lepeshinskaya participated in the Bolshoi’s traveling company, which performed before Red Army soldiers on the front line.

She recalled in the 2006 interview that she broke her leg during the first performance of “The Red Poppy” in 1953 but managed to complete her part despite four fractures diagnosed later.

Lepeshinskaya married Soviet general Alexei Antonov in 1956. When he died in 1962 she temporarily lost her sight.

She left the Bolshoi Ballet in 1963 and turned to teaching, spending several years in East Germany before returning to the Soviet Union.

Bolshoi’s prima, Svetlana Zakharova, said dancers of today would find it impossible to match Lepeshinskaya’s fiery performances.

“No one can repeat her tempo now,” Zakharova said on NTV television.